Agriculture make black metal that constantly mutates in emotionally enormous, structurally inventive, and totally exhilarating ways. The Spiritual Sound erupts with joy, anguish, disorientation, transcendence, and everything in between, but stands out for its rawness. Unlike a lot of post-black-metal releases that rely heavily on pianos, intense pad washes and huge reverb tails, The Spiritual Sound sounds like four people in a tiny room making a colossal, overwhelming racket.

My Garden opens The Spiritual Sound with a barrage of bizarre experimental phrases before the guitars drop into heaving triplet chugs while the drums stomp out a straight 4/4 underneath. The vocals rip with a treble-fried vampiric top-of-the-mix shriek that hovers above the instruments instead of cutting through them. The entire structure mutates again into a gentle but blast-beat lead passage with a major-key melody that’s totally outside a black metal context, and then lurches somewhere sludgy seconds later. In two and a half minutes you’ve already been dragged through a maze of ideas, and they’re all gripping.

This is music built to completely transfix a shoulder-to-shoulder audience in a tiny underground venue with the intensity that only an intimate show can provide, touring through every emotional register imaginable. Flea dives straight into a Deafheaven-inspired balance between blastbeats and nostalgic melancholy, whilst Micah (5:15am) rips like Svalbard with d-beat velocity and ragged emotional yelps. Dan’s Love Song leans fully into moody shoegaze with a slow-motion wash of guitar and a complete absence of drums, serving as a palette cleanser which only deepens the album’s spell.

The towering centrepiece Bodhidharma is one of the best metal tracks of the year, starting with a clean drum pattern and a riff so confident, iconic and intuitively satisfying that you wonder how nobody’s written it before, the kind of pattern that Gojira could build a festival-toppling chorus out of. And then, the whole song vanishes into nothing but a whisper with total silence except for tiny, skeletal drums and a vocal so sparse it recalls Slint’s Spiderland. When the band slams back into that ecstatic riff it’s pure transcendence.

The album closes with The Reply, a sequence that arcs towards a radiant, post-rock style explosion of colour and leaves you stunned by the whole journey, and The Spiritual Sound feels remarkably intimate despite its emotional scale. Agriculture are spiritual cousins of Alcest in their bliss-seeking transcendence, but more grounded in the communal ritual of the sweaty punk basement. It’s experimental without ever feeling obtuse, a chaos of ideas, emotions, techniques and timbres that remains cohesive and gripping from start to finish.

The Spiritual Sound is a striking emotional statement. An ecstatic eruption that feels like sunlight breaking through a storm. It’s a rare and precious thing when heavy musicians discover new colours to paint with like this.